Peace Resource Center leader combines wisdom, compassion and modesty.

Perched on a chair in Seaside’s Peace Resource Center, Sylvia Shih sweetly explains why she doesn’t like the word “hero.”

“It is really overused,” she says in a clipped Mandarin accent. “If you call me a ‘worker bee,’ that would be proper and right.”

She opens her mouth in a silent laugh, and her tiny feet – slippered in light blue socks and Birkenstocks – lift slightly off the floor. As we continue to chat, her small brown eyes never leave my face, and the gentle smile never leaves hers.

That trademark combination of humility and joy extends to the many causes to which Shih contributes her time, skills and money.

With a home in Coral de Tierra, a pension and Social Security, she funnels income beyond her basic needs to causes that combat her broad definition of injustice: the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, Dorothy’s Kitchen, LandWatch, Girls Inc., National Resource Defense Council, California League of Conservation Voters, Global Majority…

The list is so long, she starts to giggle. “I donate to some 50-plus organizations. I need to sit down to restrategize,” she says. “People are taught to make more money. But we came here empty-handed and naked; we shouldn’t go out with too much baggage.”

Shih and her late husband, Charles Turk, first turned on to activism when, as IBM employees in the mid-’70s, they joined a lunch group opposed to nuclear war. By the mid-’90s they’d retired to Monterey County, and Shih began volunteering as a Bay Net docent, teaching visitors about the wildlife in the National Marine Sanctuary. A few years ago, Shih and her husband helped found the PRC.

Though her list of volunteer causes grew, her self-importance did not. While others stepped up to titles like director and spokesperson, the Stanford alum cheerfully took on administrative tasks like database entry and accounting.

About three years ago, she was simultaneously treasurer of the Gentrain Society of Monterey Peninsula College, the League of Women Voters of the Monterey Peninsula, Peace Coalition of Monterey County and the Monterey Peace and Justice Center. “It’s important, because you have to keep things straight,” she says. “I do have a logical mind.”

Janet Wilson, the PRC’s office manager, says Shih has more than that. “She always seems to be the one with the uplifting spirit, no matter how depressed we get about the war,” Wilson says.

“She’s a bundle of energy,” adds Janet Brennan, who sat on the local LWV board with Shih. “She’s the only person I know who can get up and make a treasurer’s report exciting.”

Lately the grandma of eight has been trimming her schedule, stepping down from all but the PCMC board, and beginning to study Spanish. “In the peace community, everyone gets burnt out in rotation, but luckily there are enough people to keep filling in,” she says.

Board President and Co-Founder Joyce Vandevere, still grappling with Shih’s January departure from the board, says Shih remains one of the center’s most consistent volunteers, manning the Seaside office one shift per week.

“She has been among our wisest and best advisers,” Vandevere says. “She’s much younger than I am, but she’s kind of like your mom – she makes everything right.”